


Ripples Through Time

by Erin_Ravenseeker



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Chapter 1:, Everything Goes To Shit™, MILD - Freeform, Sexual Harassment, That Escalated Quickly™, also ignoring the whole chronological canon timeline a little because heck reality, don't worry the man pays for it, horrible misrepresentation of how working in the acting business works, seriously who needs timelines that make sense anyway, tags added per chapter as i go along, the author taking liberties with how time works
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-04-05 12:15:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14044083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erin_Ravenseeker/pseuds/Erin_Ravenseeker
Summary: >> Time isn’t a straight line. If she had to describe it, it would be a lake while you’re a fish, and every time you can turn and left or right, you actually go both ways and stay in the same place at the same time, in different realities, until the whole of time is just echoes of you everywhere and everywhen. And sometimes, very rarely, one fish breaks the surface of the lake and sends ripples across the entire thing. <<In which Wanda suffers through reality, and doesn’t.If I could save time in a bottleThe tendrils and routes intertwinedI would save every day, every route that we take, dodging death,And responding in kind





	Ripples Through Time

**Author's Note:**

> Too many tags. I apologise.
> 
> ...
> 
> Ok honestly I just apologise for this entire story.

She leaves the house in a huff of anger. It’s really neither of their faults, she knows, but now and then she can’t help think maybe if she hadn’t gotten so angry, if he had tried harder to get her to stay, if they both weren’t at the very end of their patience.

That still doesn’t mean it isn’t easy to blame it on her twin for the first few months.

She works in television, playing background roles for multiple studios developing TV shows. Single-episode characters, or recurring ones that last barely two each appearance. Voice acting for animations, but never any long-term roles. She managed to grab a job as a news reporter, firstly out in the field, when nobody expects to see her too often, but then taking the place of the anchor when the woman is killed in a mass-shooting. Somehow, she stays.

That career ends abruptly when they find out Wanda’s a mutant. The explosion and subsequent fire are blamed on a gas leak.

She calls him then, after half a year of not thinking about him and thinking about him far too much. Sitting on the curb, the phone is at her ear before she really registers dialling the familiar number. He picks up on the second ring, and she wonders how long he spent staring at the phone, debating picking up, questioning whether she really actually wanted to talk to him.

“ _Hey sis,_ ” is the first thing she hears, and suddenly everything is back to normal and as it should be and they’re the twins against the world.

“Pietro,” she smiles, and she can practically feel him grinning back, likely vibrating with energy but holding the phone stock-still so he doesn’t ruin the call, and she can’t help but be warmed by how much he cares.

He dropped out of school soon after she left, she finds out, unable to focus there without her to tether him in this version of time. She’s full of guilt as he (sheepishly) tells her about his habit of stealing and his tendency to accidentally break things from the force of moving so fast. And it gradually disappears as he then relates how much Lorna has grown, how the young girl’s (horrible, disgusting, monster of a) father had been veritably booted out of the house, how they’re 90% sure she’s a normal human and they both agree that’s a good thing.

When she hangs up the call, she’s much happier than she had been in the past year, and she swears she’ll keep in touch from now on, admitting she missed her brother just as much as he missed her.

She gets into acting full-time, taking a main role in a TV show, and after it ends three (too-long) seasons later she goes into acting for a movie. She wins an award, too; nothing major, but she’s honoured and her brother sings praise on her performance throughout their late-night phone calls. She continues with the movies, after; the roles are impermanent enough that she doesn’t have to stick around and risk herself, but there’s enough prestige to make a good living. She takes her time in building good public relations, and soon becomes a favourite in the movie industry.

—

It was an early afternoon as she retired to her caravan, filming finished for the day because they’d exhausted this scene and were only scheduled to move to the next area tomorrow. She thanked the costume and makeup departments for their help and went inside, planning to catch a few hours of sleep, or read. Neither of those happened. Someone was waiting for her.

Troy was, in the simplest form, a sleazebag. The unfortunately excellent actor lounged on her bed, reading a novel that was definitely not hers and _definitely_ not for young audiences. Wanda bit back the urge to immediately tell him to fuck off, not sure what the reaction to badmouthing one of the main actors on set would be. Instead she settled for slightly polite and slightly more threatening disdain.

“Troy. What are you doing here?”

The man’s eyes flicked up from his novel (nope, Wanda was definitely not imagining the drool at the corner of his mouth, it was actually there) and he looked her up and down, eyes stopping in _all_ the wrong places. She resisted the urge to shift uncomfortably. No weakness. Not here.

“Waiting for you,” he answered in a tone that made Wanda think if she ever thought she knew what it felt like to want to vomit, she was wrong because this feeling now was it. Instead she turned to her small desk, putting her handbag on top of it.

“What business do you have with me?” she asked, pretending to go through the bag for the sake of avoiding looking at him. She felt rather than heard him shift and move through the caravan, and she was honestly getting annoyed at his flippant disregard for other people’s space or belongings.

“Nothing too work-related,” he slurred, and the hand that came to rest very obviously on her ass was the last straw. Something snapped inside her, and everything went red. There was a scream, somewhere, but she didn’t know who it belonged to. Somewhere in the back of her mind was a shred of upset that her phone was in her bag, and Pietro wouldn’t be able to call her if it was destroyed.

At the end of it all, after she was cleared from hospital with only minor burns (she’d fix those later, before the next movie audition), she sighed at the official studio report. The movie had been delayed thanks to the death and injury of two of the main actors.

‘Gas leaks’ were becoming a far too prominent fixture in Wanda’s life.

—

Apart from a few more minor incidents, Wanda’s life is relatively calm and catastrophe-free, thank Chance. She continues with the acting career, but runs her own investigations into her possible coworkers before ever taking a job. No more losing control, she’s vowed. She only wishes it was as easy for herself as it seems to be for her brother.

Still, life is good. She owns her own house and car, she has a sizeable bank account and trophy/award cabinet, and the mail overflows with fans’ letters (luckily not many people actually show up at her door any more; she didn’t particularly mind, unless she was in a ‘bad mood’, but it became a little annoying after a while, so she had to politely ask them all to stop visiting at random, please). All in all, everything’s going well.

Until Erik Lehnsherr shows up on live TV, drops a baseball stadium over the White House, and then the blue woman shoots the president.

And Everything Goes To Shit.

The Sentinel project is rushed ahead. Stuck in the stadium, the woman (Wanda later finds out her name was Mystique; Wanda doesn’t think she deserves a name at all, for what her actions did) is captured and tested on. The early Sentinels are developed quickly, and for a while all they can do is identify and shoot machine guns at mutants.

Within ten years, the Sentinels change. They are given the ability to adapt themselves to any form deemed necessary to counter mutant powers, controlled by an elaborate (but a little rushed) formula, and any fighting chance the mutants had is fleeting. Instead they’re hunted, marked, killed in masses because the humans are oh so afraid of the things they don’t understand. Wanda doesn’t want to relate, but she used to be afraid of herself too.

When the models are upgraded, the code re-patched, there ends up nothing left. Wanda can’t believe she ever dared to hope, to dream there would be a place for her and her kind in this world. Mutant supporters and even those with dormant mutant genes are targeted next, and Pietro doesn’t stop crying for days when Lorna, ever the loving little sister, is shot in the head. It’s their breaking point, and their downfall.

Wanda dies with a lance-like appendage through her stomach, the unmoving body of her brother limp in her arms. The last thing she sees is her own tears falling through the air.

**Author's Note:**

> oops my bad
> 
>  
> 
> ~~i just realised this whole fic is literally just an excuse for me to revive that one character who died and definitely not just for the sake of my ships~~


End file.
